Had an issue with a Macrium Install on a DELL PowerEdge T110 with a fresh install of Server 2012. Server is not a DC and only has ESET file security on it, installed on a SSD with all Windows updates, basically a clean slate. After installing Macrium we ran a successful first backup. Shortly after the server became unresponsive, any open program would constantly 'not respond', disk access would freeze basically. To be honest it felt like the server was using a celeron CPU on a 5400rpm hard drive full of bad sectors.

After uninstalling Macrium the server returned to normal operation. Macrium was installed without the CBT driver as we don't need it. My suspicions are on the image guardian function but it's the main selling point to this client so I cant disable it (they have just been hit by ransomware). So yeah, any ideas since I cant afford to spend hours troubleshooting and rebooting the server since it has now gone into production..

Third-party anti-virus doesn’t count as a clean slate, in fact there are several reports of various solutions interfering with Reflect, and Macrium has a KB article about third-party AV and some other things in general. So what happens if you uninstall ESET? If that’s not an option, try at least adding exclusions for the applications in the Reflect folder and the entire destination folder of any backups. Given that the issues occurred after the backup rather than during, I’m wondering if Image Guardian was blocking ESET from scanning the new backup file and ESET bogged down the system trying to gain access. There was a previous report that Norton for some reason tries to open backup files for WRITE access during its scans, and Image Guardian would block that. That was solved by excluding the destination folder, and there’s no reason to have AV scan Reflect files anyway.

Third-party anti-virus doesn’t count as a clean slate, in fact there are several reports of that interfering with Reflect, although this is the first report I’ve seen of issues after a job is complete. What happens if you uninstall ESET? If that’s not an option, try at least adding exclusions for the applications in the Reflect folder and the entire destination folder of any backups.

Yeah you're right, I did uninstall ESET first, rebooted and same thing. Then after uninstalling Macrium all was OK again, I then put ESET back on again and still OK. So isolated to Macrium.

Interesting. Well just in the interest of further isolating variables, you can remove and later reinstall just the Image Guardian component by using the Change option in Programs and Features. I agree that if you’re not using CBT and have isolated everything else that Image Guardian seems like the likely culprit since it runs persistently, but on the other hand it just sits there blocking access rather than actively doing anything like scanning or any other resource-intensive work, so I wouldn’t have thought something like this could happen, nor have I seen reports of anything like this tied with Image Guardian. But there’s always a first, I guess.

I'm scared this not just a 'untick this option' solution Not having the image guardian would be a deal breaker but I can try removing it to satisfy curiosity. It was so odd, at first I though the SSD was a dud because it behaved like a failing SSD, random hangs, trouble reading from disk - for example just copying a directory to another folder would hang halfway through freezing up the PC. The only other thing I can think of is the Hyper V option during install but that is also a handy feature.

I have Hyper-V and Image Guardian working just fine together (in fact another optional Reflect feature called viBoot specifically uses Hyper-V), and Image Guardian is supported on Windows 8 / 8.1, and therefore Server 2012 / 2012 R2. I understand that not having Image Guardian would be a dealbreaker and wasn’t suggesting that as a solution, merely as a way to isolate variables. The reason is that if Image Guardian is in fact the culprit, then Macrium may well be able to fix it. They have a solid track record of providing updates quickly when issues are discovered.